Whether you're a caterer in Kildare, a racehorse breeder in Roscommon or a designer in Dublin, having a web presence is vital to the growth and success of your small business. You website is your brochure, your catalogue, and your sales pitch. It’s also the first impression many of your customers will get of you so you need to make sure you look good and give the visitor what he wants. Let's look at the characteristics of a successful website.
First, there's design. Your website needs to immediately establish who you are and what you’re offering. And it needs to do this in a way that establishes confidence. For this you need effective use of colour, graphics and layout. Having an amateur looking website will brand you as an amateur company.
On the usability level, your website needs to load quickly. Webs users can be impatient and it's very easy to click away. The best way to ensure fast loading is to use cascading style sheets (CSS). Using CSS results in fast-loading websites that are easy to maintain and update.
Next your website needs compelling content. Your visitors arrive at your site looking for information so you need to give them what they want clearly and accurately. This demands expert copywriting that understands both the nature of the online reader and the demands of the search engines.
Now your website need to attract targeted visitors actively seeking the product or service you're offering. To achieve this, your site has to show up in the SERPs (search engine results pages) that come up when people search on keywords or phrases related to your product or service. And you need to show up high in the results. If your company is buried at the bottom of page 7, your competitors on page one have already grabbed the business. To rank well you have two options - organic or paid.
Organic means optimising your website so that it naturally ranks high in the main search results. This is highly desirable but it's not easy. You need to make sure the words on your site are optimised as well as the tags, links and titles that the search engines read when they visit your site. Plus you need to build incoming links from authority websites. The search engines see these as a vote of confidence and so award you a higher status. All these things take skill and time.
Paid refers to pay-per-click (ppc) advertisements. These ads usually from google or yahoo show up on the right hand side of the page under the heading sponsored links. For these you pay every time a visitor clicks them. Using PPC can be a quick way to get visitors but it can be expensive.
For today's small Irish company, success depends on a strong web presence with a properly optimised site containing compelling content. Get this right and the world's your oyster. Get it wrong and your competitors will eat you alive. So if you’re looking to build your business online, or if your existing website isn’t working as you’d like, look for a local professional help. For efficiency, it’s best one firm to handle your website design, copywriting, SEM and search engine optimisation jobs.
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